Federal judge dismisses 14A lawsuit to stop Trump from voting
Judge Robin Rosenberg on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit challenging former President Donald Trump’s presence in the presidential ballot under the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.
Florida attorney Lawrence Caplan and two others filed the lawsuit a week ago as part of a growing nationwide effort to use the Fourteenth Amendment to remove Trump from the ballot, citing his alleged role in the January 6, 2021 riots at the Capitol.
Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment states that public officials are ineligible for office if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States.
However, the Obama appointee Rosenberg dismissed the case for valid reasons. Rosenberg ruled that the plaintiffs had no “recognizable” injury that would give them standing to sue.
As the Palm Beach Post reports:
“The plaintiffs do not have standing to challenge the defendant’s qualifications to run for president,” Rosenberg wrote, adding that “the alleged injuries” during the Capitol insurrection more than two years ago “are not not recognizable and are not peculiar to them”.
Rosenberg also added that “an individual citizen has no standing to challenge another individual’s qualification to hold public office.”
She pointed to two previous court rulings against plaintiffs who tried to exclude candidates from the ballot because they participated in the January 6 violence in Washington, DC.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s “disqualification” clause has gained momentum in recent months after elitist legal scholars on both the left and right proposed using it to bar Trump from running for office.
As Breitbart News reports:
(Robert, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration) Reich was recently joined by jurists William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, both Never Trump members of the otherwise conservative Federalist Society, who wrote in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review that Section 3 “disqualifies former President Donald Trump.” Trump, and potentially many others, because of their involvement in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.”
…
This weekend, jurists J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe joined the chorus, in THE Atlantic. They cited the fact that Trump has been indicted at the state and federal levels for various crimes, including a federal indictment in Washington, D.C., and an instate indictment in Fulton County, Georgia, for its efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.
The country’s secretaries of state have weighed in on the issue in recent weeks as these challenges have arisen.
New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan (right) said earlier in the week that he was ‘not seeking to remove any names’ from the GOP primary ballot after Charlie Kirk urged his supporters to call the Scanlan’s office following reports that Scanlan was considering the idea.
Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes announced this week that state law prohibits the use of the Fourteenth Amendment to bar Trump from contesting elections in Arizona.
“Now the Supreme Court of Arizona has said that because there is no statutory process in federal law to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, you cannot enforce it,” said Fonts. “That’s what the Arizona Supreme Court said, so that’s the state of the law in Arizona. Now, am I okay with that? No, that’s stupid. What I’m saying is I’m going to obey the law. And the law in Arizona is the same as in Arizona. Whether I like it or not, it doesn’t matter.
The case is Caplan versus TrumpNo. 0: 23-cv-61628, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jdixonhamilton@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter.
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